English writers as Sherlock and Bishop Butler, and,
for popular use, even Soame Jenyns. Therefore, as French scepticism
then had among the Virginia lawyers and politicians its diligent
missionaries, so, with the energy and directness that always
characterized him, he determined to confront it, if possible, with an
equal diligence; and he then deliberately made himself, while still a
Virginia lawyer and politician, a missionary also,--a missionary on
behalf of rational and enlightened Christian faith. Thus during his
second term as governor he caused to be printed, on his own account,
an edition of Soame Jenyns's "View of the Internal Evidence of
Christianity;" likewise, an edition of Butler's "Analogy;" and
thenceforward, particularly among the young men of Virginia, assailed
as they were by the fashionable scepticism, this illustrious
colporteur was active in the defence of Christianity, not only by his
own sublime and persuasive arguments, but by the distribution, as the
fit occasion offered, of one or the other of these two books.

Accordingly when, during the first two years of his retirement, Thomas
Paine's "Age of Reason" made its appearance, the old statesman was
moved to write out a somewhat elaborate treatise in defence of the
truth of Christianity. This treatise it was his purpose to have
published. "He read the manuscript to his family as he progressed with
it, and completed it a short time before his death." When it was
finished, however, being "diffident about his own work," and
impressed, also, by the great ability of the replies to Paine which
were then appearing in England, "he directed his wife to destroy" what
he had written. She "complied literally with his directions," and thus
put beyond the chance of publication a work which seemed, to some who
heard it, to be "the most eloquent and unanswerable argument in the
defence of the Bible which was ever written."[453]

Finally, in his last will and testament, bearing the date of November
20, 1798, and written throughout, as he says, "with my own hand," he
chose to insert a touching affirmation of his own deep faith in
Christianity. After distributing his estate among his descendants, he
thus concludes: "This is all the inheritance I can give to my dear
family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them
rich indeed."[454]

It is not to be imagined that this deep seclusion and these eager
religious studies implied in Patrick Henry any